"Who is your average reader?"

"Someone who’s looking for travel information."

"How old are they?"

"Eighteen to thirty."

"Not good enough. Give me a two year range."

"Well, mostly people who have just graduated college and want to backpack around the world."

As Ramit dug deeper and deeper and Matt scrambled to come up with answers, I realized that I know far less about my readers than Matt or Ramit know about theirs. Ramit pointed out that unless you’re speaking directly to the person who’s reading your site, even your ideal reader won’t be fully engaged. For example, say I want to become a better writer. A blog post about "how to write better" probably won’t catch my attention, but an article called "how to write better blog articles for people who write bi-weekly about travel and self improvement" would immediately grab me.

So to get a clearer picture of who I’m writing for, I’d like to humbly ask you to take another short survey. At the end I ask for your phone number and/or email. If you feel comfortable sharing that with me I may contact you to ask you some follow-up questions. I know I just had a survey a couple weeks ago and I feel bad posting another one so quickly.

You can fill it out below, OR you can click this link.

Thanks! I’ve also started getting serious about Google Analytics. I’ll post what I’ve learned in a week or two, and may write an article about how to really integrate Google Analytics with your WordPress theme.

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Last week someone complained about an affiliate link to Amazon. Here’s my policy: I will only link to products I have bought and love (unless otherwise noted). If there’s an affiliate link for it, I will use it. If there isn’t, I’ll still link to it.

Currently reading Talent Code. WOW. Great book. Post about that book and Talent is Overrated is coming soon.

Heading to Burning Man for the first time on Saturday. I’ll be at 9:00 and F, so if that means something to you, feel free to come by and say hi.

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There are three items I own which I’ll always upgrade when a significant upgrade exists: my computer, my camera, and my Kindle. Yesterday I got my new Kindle, the fourth generation one that was just released. Before I talk about this specific Kindle, I want to address some general points about the Kindle.

Price

Some people balk at the $189 price tag of the newest 3G Kindle (which is the only one to buy, by the way). It’s expensive, but only if you consider it a drop in replacement for books. I consider it $200 to ensure that I read at least 10X more than I used to.

Last year I didn’t count how many books I read, but my guess would be somewhere around 5-8. I can only really think of a couple, but there must have been more. I’ve had a Kindle for fourteen weeks. On the Kindle I count 24 books that I’ve read in that time, plus one book which was only available in paper and was loaned to me, which brings me to 1.8 books per week. In a year that’s almost 95 books!

This jump is attributable 80% to the Kindle and 20% to the new habit of turning my computer off at 11.

If you don’t read as much as you’d like to now, investing $189 on a Kindle will definitely improve that.

Then, of course, there’s the book prices. Most of the books I’ve read since getting the Kindle have been purchased through the Amazon store, despite the fact that I used to mostly pirate books. Why? Because I’m not paying $9.99 for a book, I’m paying $9.99 for a perfect reading experience. I actually started reading a pirated copy of Eat, Pray, Love (don’t bother reading it unless you’re a girl…), and midway through bought a legitimate copy because the formatting is so perfect. Paid books also sync across your computer, phone, and Kindle, and can be downloaded on demand from Amazon whenever you want.

The other thing to consider is that you can download a substantial free preview of almost any book, usually consisting of a couple chapters. When someone recommends a book to me I download the preview, and then when I’ve run through all of my books I start reading previews until I find one that I want to finish.

"But I love the feeling of reading a book"

I interpret this as "But I’m used to reading a book". I don’t know anyone who has gotten a Kindle and said a word about the pleasures of reading a paper book. Especially people who read big books. I recently finished Good Calories, Bad Calories, which is 640 pages. Not only is it annoying to hold such a big book, especially in bed, but it’s a huge pain to bring it with me anywhere.

The Kindle looks like paper, the font size can be adjusted to suit your preferences, and page flips can be done with one hand. I don’t like to use the word perfect, but it’s pretty darn close. Read one book on the Kindle and tell me you prefer a paperback… I dare you.

The New Kindle and Travel

The new Kindle is tiny. The half inch shaved off the width and height is far more dramatic in person than on the spec sheet. It’s now pocketable. Not that you’d throw it in your pocket with your keys and phone, but that you could put it in your pocket while you go grocery shopping and you wouldn’t really notice it. It’s thinner, too, but you have to really work to notice that difference.

The contrast ratio has been improved by 50%. I found the old one to be totally acceptable, but the new contrast ratio is immediately noticeable. You don’t need to hold the Kindles side to side… just reading a page on the new one makes any seasoned Kindle reader say "wow". It looks great.

There are now forward and backward keys on both sides. I’m really happy about this because before you couldn’t go back a page if you were holding the Kindle with just your right hand. Now you can. The keyboard DID lose the number keys, though, which I think is a mistake. Accessing the numbers using the SYM button is annoying. The new buttons have a stickier feel to them and I find the narrower keyboard much easier to type on. If I’m typing with my thumbs, narrower is better.

One HUGE improvement is the web browser, which is now based on Webkit. The old browser was usable in a pinch but pretty brutal. Here’s a side by side of my site on the new one vs. the old one.

The browser isn’t as good as an iPad or laptop or even a phone, but it doesn’t require a service plan and it works in many countries. I’m not sure if people understand that– there’s no monthly fee for the 3G on a Kindle, and it works internationally, also for free. I used my Kindle in both Japan and Canada to check my email and to make phone calls through my phone system. Google Maps used to be unusable on it– now it’s good enough to be useful.

Without a Kindle you’re just not going to read while you travel, assuming you travel lightly. On Life Nomadic I read Atlas Shrugged on my computer screen and the first few chapters of The Life of Pi on a bootleg copy of the book I bought in Vietnam. That’s it, and it’s a shame because I had plenty of long plane rides, train trips, and lazy afternoons on the deck of a ship. The size of the Kindle is so negligible that I wouldn’t have noticed it, even in my small backpack.

You can buy the new Kindle on Amazon.

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When you travel with someone for a year or two, you pick up their habits. One of Todd’s habits that I most admire, and am thankful to have picked, up is the practice of treating strangers like friends. When he goes to a restaurant and the waiter asks him how he is, he tells him what’s going on in his life and returns the question in such a way that it obligates a genuine response. When we leave a restaurant, everyone we know gets a hug.

I get nostalgic, mostly for times I wasn’t alive for. Like the middle ages. And, more relevantly, like the days before computers and cell phones, when neighbors actually recognized each other, and maybe even talked to each other. Shopkeepers were called shopkeepers, and they knew their customers by name. Their conversations extended beyond a scripted sales pitch for a rip-off extended warranty. I miss these times because I’ve seen them in movies and read about them in books, not because I’ve really experienced them.

Simple habits can be profound. One such habit that is more important than ever is to treat strangers like friends. Facebook, cell phones, and other "social" technologies have done to friendship what laminate flooring did for hardwood floors. It made things easier and more accessible, but did so at the cost of substance. In fact, this is happening in pretty much every area of life, something I’ve realized more fully now that I’m trying to find meat with substance; it’s almost impossible. So I try to treat everyone as though they’re a real person, just in case they actually are. Unfortunately I can’t answer all my email anymore, but when I do I try to write to the person as if they’re my friend, rather than use stock replies (which I could do, since a lot of the things people write about are similar). Once in a while I even fill someone in on secret future plans or send them a draft of something. When interacting with random people in everyday life, I make an effort to actually listen to them and to talk about things that they may not have talked about with every person they’ve interacted with that day.

There are benefits to doing this, by the way. I’m hesitant to bring this up because I think some people, especially those with a cursory but existent awareness of pickup, might assume that this is a ploy for self gain. And it sort of is — it feels good to make other people feel good. If I got punched in the face every time I did it (or, really, even occasionally), I would probably stop. That’s the main reason I do it. Treat someone like a real person and they feel good, treat you like a real person in return, and you feel good just like them.

Beyond that, I’m willing to go farther out of my way for a friend than I am for a stranger. So are other people. A few weeks ago a friend and I were driving to Fern Canyon in Northern California. It was late and our plan was to camp there in the RV overnight and hike in the morning. When we finally arrived, a park ranger pulled us over and told us that the camp sites were all full; we’d have to drive 20 miles back to the nearest town and find somewhere to stay. We didn’t argue or storm off, but instead we chatted with him for a minute about the hike, what our plans were, and how psyched we were to be there.

"Tell you what… go back to the stop sign and take a right. There’s a parking lot there that says no overnight parking, but I’ll cut you a break and let you stay there tonight."

Without any sort of request or deception we got a perfect place to camp and didn’t have to pay the thirty-five dollar fee. We treated him like a friend and in return he did us a favor like he would a friend. I have about a million other stories like this, too. In the Dominican Republic I chatted with a family in the airport and they ended up driving me to the city and inviting me to come to their beach house. When my RV broke down a waitress at Samovar invited me to stay at her place. My Japanese tutor is now my friend and is planning a trip to Japan with my friends and I. The shop my RV gets repaired at voluntarily lowers their rates and cuts hours off the job.

The formula to happiness isn’t a simple one, but a component of it is certainly being treated like a human being and not a robot. Give that to other people and you’ll receive it back.

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A friend told me that I shouldn’t talk about pickup in my blog because he thinks it makes me seem less credible. But, then again, he’s into pickup and isn’t proud of it like I am. What do you think?

Correction: my friend I mentioned in my last post says that she’s NOT obsessed with Jamaica. I didn’t mean for it to sound negative, if it did… she’s been there a lot and knows a lot about it.

I’ve booked the first 12 days or so of my JetBlue trip. They should sponsor me so that I don’t have to cram this all into one month.

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As anyone who follows my tweets knows, I’m going to be doing the JetBlue All-You-Can-Jet promotion. Because I’m flexible, I saved $200 and bought the five day pass for $500, which means that I can’t fly on Friday or Sunday. The pass entitles me to fly from September 7th until October 6th for free on all JetBlue flights. This includes all taxes in the US, but not outside the US. I’ve been thinking about the best way to use this pass, and I’m going to share my strategy with you, in case you bought one as well.

Mostly International

There aren’t all that many places in the US I want to go. Within a month or two of the promotion I will have been to NY, Boston, Austin and LA, which covers most of my bases. So I’m mostly seeing this as a ticket to get HUGE discounts on international travel for a month.

There are two types of international travel: the type where you blow through and do the best you can to check somewhere out for future extended visits, and then there are the extended visits. Obviously, these trips will be the former. Here’s where I’ll be going:

Colombia

I’ve never been to South America. I’ve been to Aruba, right off the coast, and I’ve been into the jungles of the Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia, but no farther. So it’s time. Taxes for this are $267, which is about 45% of what I’d normally pay to go there from San Francisco. It’s the worst deal of all the trips, but I’m excited about Colombia and South America, so I’m doing it.

Jamaica

Jamaica is only about $100 in taxes. I have a friend who is obsessed with Jamaica, so I’m hoping to get some tips from her and check it out. I know it’s super touristy, but I really want to climb up that waterfall that all the tourists climb. Hey… I’m into that kind of stuff.

Dominican Republic

I’m not 100% sure I’m going to go here, mainly because I got robbed last time and I think that soured the experience a bit, but it’s a good place to practice some Spanish and I’m already familiar with it so I won’t need time to acclimate. I never got a chance to see Tres Ojos, some cool caves, so I’ll do that.

Costa Rica

I didn’t love Costa Rica when I was there, but I was only around for a couple days and did pretty touristy stuff. There’s a lot of awesome nature there, though, so I’ll go check it out for a bit. Maybe I’ll find some couchsurfers to go camping with or something like that.

Saint Lucia and Barbados

I don’t know the first thing about either of these countries, but they’re the two remaining countries that JetBlue flies to that I’ve never visited. May as well get them checked off the list and see what they’re all about! That’s four new countries total that I will hit within the month.

Less and Better Gear

I’m going to use this month as the final test for some new gear I have. Gear post coming afterwards (or maybe during), guaranteed!

Buy All Tickets Up Front

The pass stipulates that I can cancel any ticket as long as I give them three days notice. As soon as I’m allowed to book flights on August 27, I’ll book every flight I intend to take, so that I don’t get stuck somewhere I don’t want to be. If plans change, I’ll just cancel the tickets and rebook.

No Round Trips in The US

Round trips in the US are a waste of time and travel days, so I’m going to try to string all of my US cities along. For example, I’ll probably go to Las Vegas first, then Seattle, then New York or Boston.

The Skateboard is Coming With Me

JetBlue has free checked baggage, which means that I’m taking my 30 pound electric board with me, at least in the US. I may stash it with a friend in NY when I head out of the country, and come get it later.

Cheap Extension

I haven’t planned my full route yet, but I may try to end up somewhere near SF at the end and buy my own ticket for a week later. Then I could get an extra week, if I’m not totally burnt out. You could also do this in the beginning… buy a cheap one way from Boston to NY, for example, and then start flying from there.

Mostly Couchsurfing

Two reasons: first, I’m going to be spending another $500 or so in taxes on top of the $500 pass, so I want to keep my costs down. Second, short trips are WAY better with a local to show you around. I only spend three days in Haiti and I really got a solid feel for the country. I spent the same in Singapore solo and can barely tell you anything meaningful about it. If you want to host me in one of those countries (I think I’m covered in every US city), let me know!

Tynan.net meetup?

If you want to meet up, send me an email. If there are a few readers doing this promo, I’ll organize something for us somewhere. Let me know in the comments or by email.

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I’m in Boston right now visiting family. My family from Texas thinks it’s refreshingly cool here. I think it’s refreshingly warm.

If you still have the Sprint SERO plan, hang in there — they’re about to allow you to pay $10/mo more and get any of the new devices. If only they’d make an Android world phone!

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No related posts.

Step 1. Write Book

Step 2. ???

Step 3. Profit

Let’s focus on Step 2. There are a number of ways you can disseminate your book, and since I’ve tried the most popular of them, I’m going to share my experiences and advice for each.

Self Distributed eBook

This is when you whip up a fancy PDF and sell it through your site, probably using Paypal. I currently sell Make Her Chase You like this for $47 (bundled with a 30 day mission-by-email course, 70 minute audio, etc) and Life Nomadic for whatever-you-want to pay.

Since internet marketers seem to be the people driving Lamborghinis and posting up possibly-photoshopped pictures of huge checks, this is the obvious first choice. It’s how I figured I’d make the most money, so it’s what I did first.

The pay-what-you-want method works poorly financially. I’ve gotten everything from $.01 to $135, with an average of around $125 a month. I’m happy to have $125 a month I wouldn’t otherwise have, but the real benefit of this strategy is that LOTS of people can read my book. Most people don’t pay anything, The book is downloaded about 500 times a month. At this point, spreading my message is more important to me than being paid for it, so I’m happy to continue with this plan.

The high-ticket with extras works better. I make a steady $500 a month on that after returns (maybe one every few months).

I don’t do Adwords or anything like that, because I really hate Adwords. I used to make $1500 a month from the $47 Make Her Chase You, but it took a lot of work to stay on top of the Adwords, and eventually Google didn’t like my landing page for some reason.

Bottom line on self distributing is that it’s a cool thing to do because you get 100% of the money, but unless you’re a real Adwords jockey, you probably won’t actually make enough to sustain yourself.

Self Published, Amazon Distributed, Paperback

Confession time: the only reason Make Her Chase You became a paperback is because I thought it would be cool to have my book on Amazon and because I really enjoy laying books out with InDesign. I expected that it might sell a few copies a month, make a hundred or two, and that would be it.

But I was wrong. It took off, reaching a peak ranking of somewhere around #2000 (of all books sold on Amazon), and was consistently above serious books by authors like Hunter S. Thompson and Mystery (haha… had to throw that in there. He’s beating me now!). Then a couple people left 3 and 4 star reviews and sales went way down, from 12+ a day to about 5 a day. Still great, but a real lesson to make sure your book is as good as humanly possible.

The best way to publish on Amazon is through CreateSpace. They make it insanely easy: upload PDFs of the cover and interior and they print the books on demand and ship them. Other than the one copy you order to make sure the book looks right, you never see one. I’ve sold over 1500 books through Amazon and never had to ship a single one. Pretty awesome! For the service they take roughly 55%, and you get the rest. Compare that to approximately 5-10% that an author might get through a publishing house. You can sell 10% as much as a published author and still make the same amount of money.

It seems to take a while for books to get traction, as most sales seem to come through Amazon recommendations. Once enough sales go through, your book gets associated with other books and starts showing up on their pages as well. Life Nomadic hasn’t gotten that traction yet, so it only sells a dozen copies or so a month.

CreateSpace also has a backend which allows bookstores to buy books. I signed up for it, not really expecting that any book store would find my book, but sure enough there’s some store somewhere that’s buying 25-30 copies every month.

Last, occasionally Amazon marks down books and they eat the discount. Make Her Chase You is currently 15% off, but I still get paid the same amount.

Self Published, Amazon Distributed, Kindle

For a while Amazon would actually pay the author less for a Kindle distributed book than CreateSpace, an Amazon subsidiary, paid on a book they had to print and ship. Recently the upped the percentage to 70% from 35%, with certain conditions. I agreed to the conditions, so now both of my books are available on Kindle for $9.99.

Formatting for Kindle wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, but after a couple days of wrangling with the conversions, I got the process down. My books have only been available on Kindle for a week or so, so I can’t really report numbers on them yet.

I was also going to distribute the books on iPad but I was infuriated that they wanted me to download iTunes to do so, so I gave up. Take that, Apple.

Bottom Line on Self Publishing

I think the key to self publishing is to not expect to become a millionaire by it, and to distribute on as many channels as possible. Once you do that you’re rewarded with a relatively stable amount of income that has no expiration date and requires no extra work. Every month doesn’t increase, but overall my sales continue to go up on average.

If you’ve successfully published a book, I’d love to hear about your experience and tips as well.

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Heading out to Boston tomorrow and then Burning Man on the 3rd. I bought Jet Blue’s "All You Can Jet" ticket for September, so I should be all over the place until Oct 6. They go to Colombia, so I guarantee you I’ll be there at some point.

No ETA on the RV book. I’m working on a different book which will come out first and then maybe I’ll finish the RV one. Then again, there was more interest in it than expected in the last post, so maybe I’ll bump it up the list.

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As I’ve mentioned, I’m not an authority on making money in general, but I do make a livable income through my two books, Make Her Chase You and Life Nomadic. I won’t claim to be an expert on writing books, but I definitely have enough experience that I can probably offer a good starting point for anyone interested in doing the same. In this article I’m going to focus on how to actually write the thing, as I’ve come up with a pretty cool system, and then in the next I’ll talk about how to actually publish it and make money.

After leaving Smiley Media, the only real job I’ve ever had, a friend of mine asked me why I’d never written a book about pickup. I didn’t have a good answer, so I went home and decided I’d write the thing. Forty eight hours later the rough draft was completed, and a month later I was selling copies of it. Point is– writing a book is actually a lot easier than you might expect. If you take my advice, you could easily have most of the hard work done in the next couple days, week, or month. So here’s the system:

Step One: Chaotic Outline

A book has two main components: content and structure. If you try to create both at the same time, things get complicated quickly. I like to start by getting all of the content out of my head first; this creates a big hunk of literary clay that you can mold into a book. So first, in no particular order, jot down everything topic you might want to write about. If a subtopic that you want to make sure you cover comes to mind, indent it below.

Let’s say that I was going to write a book on living in an RV (it’s actually half written…). Here’s my chaotic outline that I might create:

• Introduction
• Legality
• Power
• Solar
• Generator
• Alternator
• Inverter
• Finding parking
• Heat
• Internet
• Choosing an RV
• Security
• Cooking
• Why live in an RV?

I’d spend no more than half an hour on this list. It’s supposed to serve as a solid starting point, not as an exhaustive list of everything you need to write about. There are steps later that will ensure that you don’t forget anything.

Step Two: Write the Easiest Chapter

Writing the first chapter of a book is daunting, because all you can focus on is how little you’ve written and how much more there is to go. So start with the chapter that you’re most excited about. This also serves to inject passion into your writing, which makes it a lot more fun to read. For example, right now I’m really excited about inverters (nerdy, I know), so I might start just writing about choosing an inverter. Or maybe I’m just loving being in my RV and I really want to write the "Why live in an RV?" chapter because I’m excited about it. Often times the introduction comes last because I don’t fully know what I’m introducing until the book is mostly written.

Step Two-and-a-half: How to write

Before you write, you might want to read the Elements of Style. Beyond that, don’t worry about getting everything right. The key is to go for sheer volume, written as well as you can possibly write without rewriting a sentence or dwelling too much. Unless, of course, you’re having fun. If you’re working on a paragraph and are really excited to get an idea out in a certain way, stick with it. But if something isn’t coming together quite right, just move on. If the first step is getting the clay to mold into a book, this step is just molding the rough form. It doesn’t have to even look like the final product, it just has to have bulk and be close enough that you can get it there.

This way of writing is scary, because you realize that there’s no point in writing a book that’s not excellent, and it doesn’t feel like you’re writing an excellent book. But you are. It’s just like when you’re building a house, there’s a stage where it’s imperfect 2x4s, bent nails, and pencil scrawlings all over the place. But that’s the frame that eventually supports the marble floors and crown molding.

Here’s a trick I learned from Neil Strauss, who was a journalist before becoming an author: to mark something as needing atttention, just write "tk" in parenthesis, with a note. Like this (tk – this is an example of something I would come back to). No words (I’m not actually checking this, so some a-hole might prove me wrong) have the combination of "tk" in them, so you can easily search your manuscript (yep… you’ll have a manuscript. Fancy!) for the combo and quickly see what needs major work.

As you write, you will undoubtedly come up with other topics that need to be added to the outline. If I was writing about inverters, for example, it might occur to me that the inverter is connected to the battery and I haven’t made any reference to battery selection. Whenever this happens, just add it to the bottom of the list (or, in this case, indented under the proper category [power]). This makes your outline a living outline. Sometimes it will get shorter as you chip away at the chapters, and other times it will get longer with every chapter because you’ll keep coming up with good ideas.

Once you finish a chapter, delete it from the list and start with the next most exciting one. If none of them ore exciting, pick the one you think will be the shortest. Just keep the ball rolling. Usually what happens, though, is that once you’re down to the chapters you don’t really want to write, you’re so far through the book that the promise of finishing it is enough motivation to make any chapter exciting.

Step Three: Fix the TKs

At this point you should have 90% of the content of your book on paper, thoroughly disorganized. Before we start organizing it, search for "tk" and address every single one. A lot of it, at least in my case, is stuff like: (tk – this paragraph sucks. Make it better.) or (tk – add something about removing the air conditioner here) or (tk – can you fit the story of the drunk woman with the dog in here?). This might be a few hours or a full day of adding and cleaning up paragraphs. From this point on, I’m considering everything I write to be worthy of final publication. It may be edited again, but I’ll take the time to make sure it’s solid. It’s okay to do this at this stage, but not in step two-and-a-half, because now I’m not in danger of losing steam by getting stuck on a paragraph on page two.

Step Four: Arrange it

Now the content is in passable form, but the book is totally out of order. The easiest thing to do from here is to write the titles of the chapters in a notepad file and rearrange them in an order that makes sense. Then go back to the document and copy and paste the chapters to fit the new order. You’ll continue to tweak the order in the next steps, but this will get most of the work done.

Step Five: Revise

This is the fun part. For the first time, you’ll get to actually read this book you’ve written. You’ll do this step several times, and I’d advise you to work your way from the beginning to the end each time. If you don’t, you’ll tend to lose sight of the whole picture and revise the beginning a lot more than the end.

I continue to read through the book and make edits until I sense that the edits are becoming insubstantial. The first time you read through you’ll be rewriting paragraphs, moving chapters around, cutting things out, and maybe even adding chapters needed to bridge gaps. By the end you’ll be wondering whether an analogy is more potent when you relate RV fans to the "sweet western trade winds" or "the breath of God himself". That’s when you know you’re done.

My next post will be 72 hours from now. Will anyone have finished at least steps one and two by then? It’s a challenge…

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I wrote the first version of Make Her Chase You in forty-eight hours on a subcompact laptop with a 9 inch screen. I should mention that I did absolutely nothing else for those forty-eight hours. I may have slept for eight and eaten a couple meals. Here’s a picture of the same model laptop I wrote it on (with some married guy’s hand on it):

I think I said this a few posts ago, but it’s still on my mind so I’ll say it again: the comments recently have been awesome. Thanks a lot for taking the time to chime in.

A few people have complained about the slide down email thing. I get a lot of new readers from these things, so I need to have something. I’ve tried to make it as unobtrusive as possible and am sticking with it even though it’s 50% as effective as the old one. I WILL make a way for readers to hide it forever, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. Really busy these days!

Speaking of which… if you get this post by email, it should be formatted correctly now. Send me a screenshot if it’s not.

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No one is going to tell you an easy way to make money

In the beginning days of my gambling thing, it was very easy to make money. The system was basically foolproof and anyone with a credit card could make a good yearly income. I wasn’t making money through any sort of skill, I was essentially exploiting a loophole. But here’s the thing about loopholes: no one is going to tell you how to do them, especially not someone you don’t really know personally. Because if too many people find out about a loophole, it closes. So if you want to make "easy money", you’re probably going to have to stumble upon it yourself. If someone IS trying to share a loophole with you (especially aggressively, by email) it’s probably a scam like a HYIP or a Forex trading scheme.

Most of the people who were gambling like I was now play poker. You can play poker online or in casinos and make six figures a year. But it’s not a loophole, so it’s okay to tell everyone. The barrier to entry is a few years of exhaustive practice, thousands of dollars to lose while learning, and the ability to sustain that lifestyle while you struggle to break even.

You should probably do something you like to do

As someone whose income has oscillated in the past 10 years by a factor of 10 or so, I can tell you that by far the most important factor in terms of life satisfaction is that you’re doing something you enjoy doing. For me that’s mostly writing books, working on my site, and programming. If you hate, or are just ambivalent, about these things, they’re probably not for you. I would rather make $40,000 a year doing something I love than $400,000 a year doing something I hate. Your daily life will affect your happiness a lot more than your bankroll will, assuming you make enough to cover the basics.

This rule alone makes it impossible for me to offer any sort of meaningful career advice to anyone other than my close friends. I don’t know what you love to do, and I’m not going to suggest anything you don’t love.

Whatever you do, don’t get a real job

This goes hand in hand with #2, but I’m separating it out because it’s something I feel pretty strongly about. If you’re writing me for advice, it probably has something to do with you subscribing to my ideas about the importance of freedom and travel. Jobs don’t give you freedom or let you travel (much). So if you want my heavily-influenced-by-my-own-experience advice, don’t get a job.

The Key to My Lifestyle is NOT on the Earning Side

I can live life like I do because I’ve mostly divorced myself from materialism and spending money. I don’t buy things I can’t afford, and I don’t buy things I can barely afford. I buy things that I can easily afford. When I bought my RV in cash, it only used up about half of my cash reserves. The reason I had those cash reserves were because of a many-year-long pattern of spending significantly less than I could afford to spend. Money is worth a lot more to me in the bank because it is then a big chunk of freedom. Once I buy something with it, it reduces my freedom.

Some people think I’m really rich, and others think I’m really poor. That’s because I have the best of everything I want, and pretty much nothing else. That’s intentional.

I’m particularly cautious about monthly costs. My only fixed monthly costs are $18 for cell phone and internet (it was a loophole, you can’t get that deal now), $109 for a spa membership (hey, I need to shower everyday and gym showers suck), around $40/month for my server and accompanying services that run this site, $50 for cryonics related stuff, and $30 for RV insurance. That’s $227. Most people spend at least five to ten times that on rent, cable, phones, and junk like that.

So, if you want a lifestyle that looks like mine…

My advice is to RIGHT NOW cut your expenses to the bare minimum. In fact, cut them to as close as zero as possible. Cancel everything that doesn’t have a termination fee, sell everything you own, and live at your parents’ house for a couple months. That’s how you find out what you actually need and want. I found out by selling everything and traveling around out of a 28L backpack. I discovered that I needed even less than I thought, and now I’m looking for a smaller backpack.

Once you find out the bare minimum of what you need to be happy (hint: most people who have tried this are HAPPIER with less stuff. It removes a lot of stress), then start thinking about how to move from working a job to living a life.

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Next post: How to write a book

Gear post STILL coming soon. Todd and I are looking at smaller backpacks because I’ve downsized significantly since last time. I’m really excited to share all the stuff I’ve found, but I’m hoarding it for one big post that will blow your GD mind.

I’m getting into this two posts a week thing… seems to be the right balance for the site. Thanks for all the great comments recently… I read them all on my phone, but don’t do a good job of remembering to reply to them.

Bonus points if you know what the picture is of…

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Last Wednesday a friend decided to buy an RV in Portland, Oregon. Knowing that a decent part of my recent life has been dedicated to ripping apart my RV and rearranging it, he offered to fly me up there to check it out with him and drive back down. Done deal.

Two days later we’re greeted at the Portland airport by a beautiful 2000 Roadtrek 170. I used to think that my RV was the shortest fully functional RV, but I was wrong. This thing is only 17 feet (vs. my 20’8″), and still manages to pack in a bathroom, kitchen, and all that. The only thing stopping me from selling mine and buying one is the fact that it doesn’t have a full-time bed. Other than that, this thing is ideal. So if you’re RV shopping in this size range, check it out.

Here are a few snippets from the trip:

Paley’s Place

As I mentioned in the footnotes of another post last week, deciding to eat properly raised meat still leaves me with almost no acceptable choices of restaurants beyond the vegan restaurants I already eat at. Grass fed/finished beef just doesn’t seem to exist in most restaurants.

Once we finished all the RV stuff in Portland on our first day here, I searched for grass fed beef, and found one standout restaurant: Paley’s Place. Expensive, but after technically being a carnivore for a couple weeks and still not eating grass fed beef in a restaurant, I was up for it.

I could go on and on about the whole meal, but in the interest of being concise, I’ll just tell you about the most amazing part: jamon iberico de bellota. I don’t really even like ham, but I have been wanting to try this stuff for at least four years. It comes from a specific type of pig that roams freely in the oak forests between Portugal and Spain. The acorns which make up the bulk of its diet give it a unique taste, and the fat ends up being extremely rich in monounsaturated fat, like olive oil. Once the pigs are killed, the meat is cured for a full three years and then sold for around $100 per pound. It’s one of the rarest and most delicious meats in the world. I couldn’t believe my luck when I saw it on the menu.

I’ve had a lot of fancy foods before. Foie gras, Kobe beef, caviar, etc. Generally I think they’re overrated. Well, not the Kobe beef, but most other things. But this ham was beyond incredible. It had such a rich, distinct, and complicated flavor that I couldn’t believe it. In fact, it was so good that I couldn’t wipe the huge smile off my face while eating it. Amazing. If you have the chance to try it, definitely take it.

Eagle Creek

The reason there isn’t a new gear post is because I’ve found a few amazing new pieces of gear that I haven’t purchased yet. I have really high expectations for them, so I don’t want to write a gear post before getting them. The problem is that two of them, a new insulation jacket and a new shell, are replacing items I already have. And it just seems wasteful to get rid of the fleece and shell that have served me well since 2007. I forgot my jackets in San Francisco, though, which was just the push I needed to get over the hill to buy the new ones I’ve been eyeing for a while.

We went to e-OMC, an outdoors store, where I tried on a few things and ultimately bought a new shell. During the trying on process we idly asked where we should go hiking. Eagle Creek was recommended, so we went there.

Overall it was a pretty great hike. We did the 4.2 mile roundtrip hike to punchbowl falls, which was the highlight of the trek. The falls themselves aren’t the most spectacular I’ve ever seen (there’s a far bigger one visible from the road on the way there), but what’s really striking is just how green everything is. That’s my kind of forest. From the trail you hike down a few hundred feet into a gorge lined with moss covered cliffs. There’s a really cold creek running through it, cascading over waterfalls, and as far as you can see upwards are the kind of tall skinny pine trees that scream northwest. Really beautiful.

Bagby Hot Springs

I’m a big fan of hot springs, but until this weekend I hadn’t made it out to any that were in a really natural setting. The one I’d been to in Japan was in a small rural town, and Harbin Hot Springs in California is really well developed. Bagby hot springs is in the middle of a national forest and the tubs are made of giant hollowed out tree trunks laid on their sides. A few pictures from Flickr and we were convinced to go.

After the 1.5 mile hike required to get to the springs, we found the tubs and whipped off our clothes, ready to get in. Only then did we notice that everyone else was wearing bathing suits except for the four extremely gay guys in the corner. How am I so sure they were gay? Well, they had two people in each tree-trunk tub, and were splashing each other while squealing like young girls. Then again, they were also 100% sure that we were gay. Why? Because we ended up sharing a tree trunk as well, for starters. By the time we got a a bucket to mix cold water in with the hot, there was only one trunk left, and we weren’t about to hike all this way and not get a good soak in. Oh, and there was this conversation:

“Where are you from?”

Me: “San Francisco”

“Oh, I love San Francisco. I lived there for seven years.”

“Cool. I just came out a year ago.”

Only after saying that did I realize the double entendre, but it was too late.

Anyway, no big deal. We soaked in our log, they splashed around in theirs, and everyone was happy.

Next to our log was a larger round cedar tub that could generously be called a four person tub. Eventually its occupants left, so we decided to jump in to get some more room. Then one of the guys asked if we minded if he joined. Of course not. And then another. It was getting crowded, and another one of them came over and started hovering, looking for a good place to squeeze in. My friend and I looked at each other and burst out into uncontrollable laughter because of the invasion, which they had every reason to think was quite welcomed. Before the fifth guy could wedge his way in, we excused ourselves and started hiking back to the RV.

Log Walk

The hike to Bagby follows a creek which occasionally has a fallen tree across it. I’d estimate that the logs are forty or fifty feet long and about thirty feet from the rocky creek at the highest. Given our proclivity for slightly dangerous activities, it was no surprise that the idle talk of walking across a log turned into goading and an obligation to prove one’s manliness. So we scootched our way across one way, and then more goading led to walking upright on the way back. Not the greatest achievement in the world or anything, but it definitely feels good to challenge yourself and face a fear (even if the fear is justified).

Fern Canyon

As if we hadn’t already done enough hiking and wilderness immersion, we had one more spot to hit on the way back: Fern Canyon. I was wowed by pictures of it on my friend Alison‘s facebook page and made a mental note to go there. And finally, about eight months after seeing those photos, I had the chance.

We got there around 11pm and were greeted by a park ranger who pulled us over. The campgrounds were full, he said, and we’d have to backtrack to the nearest town, which was a considerable distance away, given that we were in the middle of a national park. Then, finally, just as he was about to walk away, he said, “Tell you what?’ll cut you a break. Go over to the parking lot where it says no camping, and you can just stay there.” Perfect!

The next morning we woke up and made our way through two small streams (in the RV) across a bit of seaside grassland that had an Elk rooting around.

Right after the Elk was the beginning of the Fern Canyon hike. The canyon is bordered by thirty foot high walls on either side, each totally covered with ferns. Amazing. The hike is really fun because it criss-crosses the stream that runs through the canyon. When we reached the end of the path we took some steps up to one of the ridges alongside the canyon. There we found ourselves in one of the tallest forests I’ve ever been in. The trees all looked perfect to climb, and so we did. I made it fifty feet up a one-hundred foot tree, but finally got sick of all the giant spider webs and came back down.

(I don’t think that picture really gives an idea of the scale, but I tried…)

After the tree we made a quick trip to the nearby beach, where I saw another animal I’d never seen in the wild before: seals! I tried to take photos, but they didn’t come out well.

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Hopefully these sorts of posts are interesting to people. Would love to hear feedback.

We actually also stopped in the Humboldt Redwood Forest on the way back and walked a bunch of other logs. You feel like a tiny little elf when you run around in that forest because all of the trees are so huge.

I didn’t mention what an awesome city Portland is, but it’s REALLY awesome. Not big enough that I would want to live there, but I’m looking forward to visiting again.

I’m trying hard to stick to a Monday / Thursday posting schedule. This one is late because I wanted to include Fern Canyon AND I basically haven’t had internet access until now. I’m sure no one’s too upset about a one day delay…

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A lot of people, hopefully not you, are living lives of glamorized, self inflicted, slavery. I’ve debated writing about this for a while, because of the connotation, but it’s something I think about constantly. Sometimes I see someone working and I realize that they don’t have the freedom to spend their days according to their own discretion. I try to empathize and imagine what it might be like, and as a result I feel a twinge of panic. It’s unfathomable.

Time is all we have. If you’re in a job that you don’t enjoy, and you’re not consistently saving up money, you are wasting your time. I don’t care if you have a Porsche or a Schwinn, a penthouse or a room in a subleased apartment on the fringes of town. You can say that life is short, or you can say that it’s long, but either way, it’s finite. Today’s the last day just like today that you have.

There’s no conspiracy in play, trying to turn people into slaves. It’s simpler than that: people take the path of least responsibility, and thus put the control of their lives into other people’s hands. Why do so many people give up the best hours of the best days of their lives? Because it takes no thought. Everyone else gets a full time job, so why not?

On the other end of things, everyone raises their spending level to match their income. You can blame the advertisers, or you can give people a little more credit and concede that maybe they had some role in the process, too. People spend and spend on luxuries that don’t matter, fueling these purchases with the relinquishment of the biggest luxury in life: time. Debt and acclimatization to faux luxury ratchet up the addiction to the paycheck, making it harder and harder for the worker to leave.

So what’s my suggestion? Well, if I was a slave in 19th century America, I would run. And if I was a slave in 21st century America, I would still run. You don’t have to know where you’re going to know that you’re not where you want to be. Plan your escape and run.

If I stopped writing here, I’d get comments from people saying that they need the security and money of a job and can’t just leave. I disagree. There are tons of illegal Mexican immigrants who are working for below minimum wage and are STILL sending money back to Mexico. They live on almost no money, and they’re people just like you. Like lots of things worth doing, claiming your freedom takes effort, and maybe even sacrifice.

Not every job is slavery, of course. My friend Ben works as a researcher for clinical trials. That would be slavery to me, but he loves it. Like any other job, the company is using Ben to further itself, but Ben is also using the company to further himself. He couldn’t do clinical research alone.

My friend Tarzen is a masseuse. He likes his work, too, but he lives humbly and works only three days a week. When his employer tried to get him to work more, he said, “Sorry, I work three days a week and live life for the rest of them.” He knows what his priorities are, and his actions reflect that.

I have another friend, Luke, who started a DNA sequencing company. He works constantly, and is actually considering moving into an RV so that he can sleep in the parking lot of the office building. He works harder and longer hours than 90% of people, but he’s building something and trying to change the world. He has his freedom, and he’s using it to work. There’s a big difference between that and slavery.

The worst possible thing you can do is work a job you don’t like and spend all the money. Let your work be something you like to do, and if you can’t do that, make sure you’re saving your money so that you can create work that you like to do.

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Photo was taken at a Khmer Rouge torture camp in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

If you have a ProSine 2.0 Inverter, please email me!

Travel: Just got back from LA / San Diego / Austin / Harbin Hot Springs. Going to Portland this weekend to check out an RV for a friend and drive it back with him.

Book recommendation (I actually have about 10 of these that I need to write in detail about): Good Calories, Bad Calories. It’s very thorough and compelling, and I’m only halfway through.

Thanks for reading!

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Todd and I hang out a lot, which breeds a sort of familiarity that leads to every phrase being shortened as much as possible. For example, if one’s laptop batteries were very low, the word “critbatts” might be invoked. So when we found ourselves standing outside of the VIP area of the X Games in LA, and Todd said, “Dude, let’s just smash it”, I knew exactly what he was talking about: the Gaijin Smash.

The Gaijin Smash is a term used to describe a certain way of operating as a foreigner in Japan. The Japanese are extremely polite and sometimes nervous around foreigners (Gaijin), so as a foreigner you tend to get your way. I think the phrase came about from some guy smashing his way through the subway barriers without paying, and not being stopped. Todd and I mostly used it to ride our hilarious fold-up bikes like maniacs.

Anyway, back to the X-Games. Thanks to my brother and his good friend Chase Hawk, Todd and I had passes to this year’s event in LA. But our passes were weird: they were only meant to give us access to the skate park section of the course, because Chase was only riding the park. But we also had friends competing in the street course, so we found ourselves standing outside the entrance to the VIP area of the street course, wanting to watch them.

“Dude, let’s just smash it.”

We walked up to the security guard.

“Sorry, you aren’t allowed in here.”

“Yes we are. We have industry guest passes.”

“Sorry, I was told to only let in yellow and red badges.”

“Oh, I know. it’s so complicated with so many badges this year. Look, our friend is about to compete right now and we came down from San Francisco just to see him. We’re supposed to be up there and we don’t want to miss our friend’s run.”

“Oh, okay.”

A bit of confidence in an unclear situation goes a long way. When the finals were over, we also casually climbed over the fence and walked onto the course to congratulate our friends. No one said anything. I hesitated before climbing over, only because I was scared to break a rule, and Todd reminded me, “Well, now you HAVE to do it.” The last time he said that to me was when I was considering climbing through the window of a moving vehicle to surf or the roof of our car as we crossed the Bridge of the Americas in Panama.

Back when we had our 40′ school bus, we would pretty frequently get pulled over by the police. The bus was in a legal grey area. We were supposed to have removed the flashing lights, it had only one seatbelt for the driver, and no one was 100% sure whether or not we were legally allowed to drive it. Police would pull us over and we would confidently assert that we were legally allowed to drive it because it had a kitchen area in it, which made it technically an RV. This was based on a real law, but we couldn’t actually figure out the legality of driving the bus. The officer, not wanting to appear ignorant of bus laws, would mutter something like, “Oh yes, that’s right,” and let us go.

I’m a pretty strong believer that following rules for the sake of following rules is a bad idea, and that thinking for yourself is a better idea. We WERE supposed to be in the street course; we had friends competing there and if they had realized our passes wouldn’t allow us there, they would have fixed the situation. The VIP section was pretty much empty, so no one’s spot was being taken by us being there. Same with walking on the course at the end; doing so didn’t infringe on anyone.

I have a pretty strict no-lying policy, but the one time I break it is when confronting authority figures who are enforcing rules they don’t have the authority to negotiate. On the rare occasions that police knock on my RV door, I might fudge my travel schedule to make it look like I’m just passing through. If they had the authority to allow me to stay, I’d be honest and tell them that I loved SF and that I’m staying there and doing my best to be a good neighbor by picking up trash and such. Same with the X-Games security guard: if he realized we weren’t technically allowed there with our passes, he might worry about his job if he let us through. By deceiving him we set ourselves up to take the blame if someone decides we’re somewhere we shouldn’t be, and no one is slighted in the process.

Anyway, the point is this: I believe that thinking for yourself is the right thing to do, even when you’re confronted with bureaucratic rules. Do what you want as long as it’s morally sound, and don’t do things that go against your morals, even if they ARE legal. 

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To give credit where it’s due, my good friend Elliot first came up with the phrase “critbatts”. I love it.

Congratulations to Chase Hawk, Aaron Ross, and Sean Sexton for all making it into the top 10 in their events!

We actually DID get caught by the police for the car surfing thing in Panama. They made us pay a $20 bribe, but thought that the whole thing was hilarious.

Small meat update: there are almost NO restaurants that serve naturally raised meats. Being a healthy carnivore at restaurants is roughly the same as being a strict vegan.

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